Eaten up with jealousy at other's blogs, I've finally made my own. Not just a nurse, a very odd nurse obsessed with knitting, spinning, my kids and my dogs. Welcome to my world.edited to add: quilting. Yeah, that bug bit me, too. I think I have low resistance to craft bugs.

Thursday, July 24, 2008

free hand fans, machine style

Here's the quilt made of the Drawing Room fabric by Anna Marie Horner. (Can I pause here to mention how much I admire someone with five kids who gets anything done, let alone bringing us loads of lovely fabric.) I am a great admirer of Tonya's free hand fans. I like what Gwen Marston says about fans, as well, that you can see the measure of the quilter's forearm by how big her fans were. But there is that matter of incompatability between myself and hand work.Thus, machine style free hand fans. I am free motion quilting on the Singer 201. Here you can see both successful and unsuccessful attempts at back tracking when I reach the end of one arc and need to move to the beginning of the next arc. The other option is to lift the needle and then trim the thread ends. I may try that tomorrow, or I may continue on in the imperfect way in which I have begun. The backtracking would work better, I think, if I were using solid rather than variegated thread. When the color of the thread changes, even a perfect back track shows. The other thing I am considering is making that part more obvious, sort of like the small arcs done in saishiko stitching.

In the knitting world, I had a nice knit night at my LYS. I am moving very slowly on the sweater- I seem to have let the part of my brain that remembers pattern stitches atrophy. Ah well, it all gets done eventually.

Tonya- yes, some definite bobbles- I think it is the scale of the fans. I'm getting fairly pleased with my small quilting, but this is a whole nother set of muscles. I think the key is to run the machine much more slowly than I am used to. Practice practice!

About Me

I'm a former critical care pediatric nurse. Now I just teach folks how to care for their newly installed medical hardware.And, I knit like a fiend, spin some, make stuff,quilt in a supremely non linear way, let the kids make giant art related messes, have only two half trained dogs, a tolerant husband, and generally make anyone who has ever seen my house feel better about their house keeping. Run on sentences and misuse of the semi colon; also favorite activities.